In 1993, a 17-year-old pupil at a Glasgow school was unmasked as a fully grown adult. Now his classmates have made a documentary – My Old School – about the astonishing deception
What most people remember about Scotland’s notorious schoolboy impostor Brian MacKinnon is the size of the lie. How did a 30-year-old man, with only a dodgy accent and a worse perm, succeed in passing himself off as a 17-year-old high-school pupil in one of the most salubrious suburbs of Glasgow, hoaxing teachers who had already taught him some years before? Moreover, why would anyone want to?
MacKinnon made sky-high headlines in the mid-1990s, but these questions are re-posed three decades later with curiosity, humour and some tenderness in My Old School. Directed by Jono McLeod, a school contemporary of MacKinnon’s (the second time around), the film pieces together the recollections of former classmates, friends and teachers, finally allowing his peers their say on the subterfuge that defined their coming of age.
